The Farmer Who Waited for the First Rains

Every morning in November, Tendai walks to the edge of his field before he eats. The soil is red and hard. It cracks into small plates under his boots. The msasa trees on the ridge have already turned their new leaves from red to green, the way they do before the rains. But the sky stays a flat, pale blue.

He has ploughed. He has the maize seed in sealed bags in the storeroom, bought with money he saved from selling two goats. His neighbour, Mai Rudo, planted a week ago after one small shower. Her seed is now lying in dust. Some of it will have died.

At night the family eats sadza and greens under the paraffin lamp, and the talk always returns to mvura. Rain. His son, who is fifteen, has a phone and reads the forecasts aloud. One site says rain on Thursday. Another says next week. Another says a dry season, the whole region below normal. Tendai listens to all of it and says little.

The pressure is not only in the sky. If he plants too early, the seed is lost. If he plants too late, the crop will not finish before the rains end in March. There is no second bag of seed. And he is tired of the feeling that his whole year depends on something he cannot hold.

On Sunday, the reading at the small church under the gum trees was from James. The old man who led the service read it slowly in Shona, then once more in English for the visitors. “Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.”

Tendai had heard it before. This time it landed differently. James did not say the farmer was idle. He said the farmer waited for something precious. And James was writing to people who were also waiting, for justice, for the Lord's coming, for wrongs to be put right. The farmer was his picture of how to wait well: still working, still watching, not losing heart.

So he did what a patient farmer does. He did not plant into dust. He cleared the contour ridges so the rain, when it came, would soak in and not run away. He mended the fence. He went to the agricultural extension meeting and asked about a shorter-season variety. He sat with Mai Rudo and helped her work out what seed she could still save. Waiting became a kind of work.

On the second Thursday the clouds stacked up in the east. That evening there was thunder, and then the smell, that sharp, sweet smell of rain on hot ground. It was not a heavy storm. It was enough to start.

He planted on Saturday with his son beside him. Nobody knows yet what the harvest will be. The season may still be thin. But Tendai has noticed that he sleeps better. The rain is still not in his hands. It never was. Patience, he has decided, is not pretending you are not anxious. It is keeping faith while you wait.